


liminal

by TheBlackestFrost



Category: American Gods (TV), American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27317074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBlackestFrost/pseuds/TheBlackestFrost
Summary: "Before Mother Church came along and fucking stole it, before the Pope stepped in to take away yet another of the ‘barbaric pagan rituals’, it was Samhain.”It is Halloween, and Laura is playing pretend.
Relationships: Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney
Comments: 11
Kudos: 83





	liminal

**Author's Note:**

> Playing fast and loose with some of the interpretations and lore here, folks. Hints and impressions more than concrete realities or historical accuracy, but that's partly because I expect that's the bits and pieces left in the big man.
> 
> Written as a welcome for a fandon newbie, and with the usual copious appreciation of the fount of AG knowledge for the inspiration.

“Happy Halloween!”

She rolls her eyes.

The gas station attendant’s voice is chipper enough that the grunt of response is drowned out. From the bathroom attached to the shop Laura listens as the automatic doors sound a pleasant ‘ping’.

It's after midnight, and all good children are in bed.

She steps on the cigarette butt, grinding it uncaringly into the floor of the bathroom and stares dispassionately at the ashy mark left behind. 

She doesn’t look up as the door opens. He is still for a minute before handing over over her goodies without a word, and she doesn’t bother to say thank you.

Laura is getting dressed up.

It’s Halloween, and that’s what you do.

Granted, you don’t normally do it in a gas station bathroom with an oversized leprechaun taking up precious space as he leans against the doorway. She could ask him to leave, could snap at him to wait outside, but she doesn't want to do that right now and is in no mood to consider why.

It isn't a traditional place to dress up, but it’s what she is doing, nonetheless.

It’s not that she’d been a fan of Halloween in real life. It had been Shadow who stood by the door with bowls of candy ready for trick or treaters. He was always comfortable with kids, smiling and complimenting their costumes, careful to nod politely at watchful parents on the street. She’d left him to manage that while she had forced herself to ignore the Spooky Specials on television, avoided watching the little crowds of children through the windows. Back then she’d told herself it was just commercial bullshit and she hated all that nonsense.

Nonetheless, whenever he brought up being out so they missed the trick or treating she’d found some kind of excuse for why they needed to stay in. (maybe, just maybe, she wished she could capture the sugar rush excitement of dressing up in the brightest butterfly costume imaginable and acting wild enough that her long suffering mother would sigh loudly, announcing to everyone just how difficult the child was, and somehow the sound would add to Laura’s enjoyment of the evening…maybe she wished she could get that heady rush of fun back, a kind of hyperactive nostalgia she didn’t feel anymore…maybe she wanted something other than the grey)

Shadow never mentioned the chair she sat in, facing away from the window but well able to hear the laughter and singsong 'Trick or Treat!'. 

Looking back she wonders what exactly she thought she thought her denial was achieving.

Now Laura struggles to ignore the oddly organic looking stains on the mirror while she unpacks a $3 witches’ hat and fake nose. Sweeney is leaning against the door watching as she carefully puts on her items, the hat making the flies around her head buzz angrily.

The plastic bites against her cheeks and the hat is too big for her, but she has insisted enough to irritate him into complying, and refuses to back down now that she’s gotten her way. She applies the red lipstick he’d grabbed her carefully, tucking it back into his pocket, ignoring his eye roll.

She studies herself in the ugly bathroom lighting, wiping away a smudge of lipstick from her yellowing teeth and swatting a fly that tries to stick against the makeup. Perhaps she should have asked him to find foundation, perhaps anything would be better than the unhealthy grey and bruised look she seemed to carry these days.

Then again, maybe it adds to the costume?

Tonight she wants levity. Wants amusement. Wants to play pretend.

She remembers a line from Kill Bill 2, when the male character is moments from being killed via five point palm exploding heart technique, when he’s waxing lyrical about how superheroes all wear disguises. Costumes and masks they put on to hide their identity. But not Superman. His costume is his glasses and job at the Daily Mail; his super suit is made of his baby blanket.

Clark Kent is his disguise; Superman is who he truly is.

Tonight she wants a disguise. Or to be who she truly is. She’s really not sure.

Either way, it requires a witch’s hat.

It is Halloween and that's when you can do that, isn't it? Dress up as something spooky and creepy and disgusting and feel...welcome.

She looks up at him in the mirror, his eyes calm and focused on her, patient.

He’s back, the Baron’s potion pulling him from wherever he’d gone, his corpse reanimating on the side of the highway where she’d dumped him.

_She holds the vial up to the afternoon sunlight, enjoying the play of colours. From her finger she manages to squeeze a few drops of sluggish, putrid liquid that could only generously be referred to as blood. Disgusting it may be, but she believes it will work just fine for this purpose. It’s the most honesty she’s willing to grant herself, one of action rather than reflection._

_She pulls his jaw open and pours it down, holding it closed like when she used to give Dummy his medication and she had to force him to swallow. She resists the urge to leave her hands on his face, avoids considering the roughness of his beard and the softness of his hair._

_She watches and waits and hopes against hope that she hasn’t bet on the wrong man, again._

_She doesn’t have to wait long._

_The switch from death to life is fast, his massive form hauling itself upright as he splutters and coughs and hacks up whatever has accumulated over the last 12 hours. He rolls onto his hands heaves against the grass for another minute or two._

_“You’re lucky…got you out before they could embalm you.”_

_She means it, though it sounds as snarky as anything else she says._

_He doesn’t seem appreciative, sitting back on his heels and staring at his hands, running his fingers over the bloodied patch on the front of his shirt where he was run through._

_“How the fuck-“_

_His head snaps up to her and his eyes narrow._

_She goes to stand and he grabs her wrist, yanking her back down and gripping her forearms so hard she would worry about bruising if not for her lack of blood flow._

_”The fuck did you do?”_

_She shrugs._

_“Got lucky.”_

_He grits his teeth and releases her, pushing himself upright and clenching his fists as if to keep himself from breaking something. He paces back and forth for a moment before turning back to her with something that could be called disgust, anger, or hurt...depending on the angle of the light._

_“You can’t fucking do it, can you? Can’t bring yourself to save yourself even if it’s right fucking there in front of you?”_

_“That’s a weird way to say thank you.”_

_He stares at her then and his anger dissipates, leaving behind something like sadness. Another trick of the light._

_“Why?”_

_They both know he could mean any number of whys._

_Why didn’t you use it when the Baron first made it for you? Why didn’t you tell me about it? Why have you used it on me?_

_She shrugs, staying well within her comfort zone. She's pushed herself enough for today._

_“I’m still new to this whole Gods and Monsters bullshit; I’m killing Wednesday and I need help.”_

_She stands and turns to walk away._

_She doesn’t see him staring after her, so she misses the moment he calls a familiar spear from the hoard, and stares at it for several frozen heartbeats before sending it away again. She misses the spark in his eyes as he stares at his hands again, misses the confusion and then awe as he gapes at her retreating form._

_She misses all of this but it doesn’t matter._

_She knows he’ll follow, and wonders who exactly she thinks she’s kidding._

So he's back and now she makes him buy her Halloween gifts and they don’t talk about anything real.

“Well?”

He shrugs as he lights a cigarette.

“Well what?”

She does a spin in the grotty bathroom.

“How do I look?”

He looks her over and as his eyes rake across her she lets herself imagine, just for a moment, that there is hunger there.

_He has been different since he came back._

_It’s subtle, and she doubts many would have picked up on it if they didn’t spend as much time around him as she does._

_He’s still himself, the odd mix of insight and meatheadedness she’s come to associate with him. He’s still quick to pick up the bottle and slow to put it down. Quick to start a fight and slow to finish it, if not for lack of trying on the part of his opponents._

_The last two weeks she has seen him flirt with strangers, pocket too many brochures and postcards, electrocute himself while starting cars, and one memorable evening he got into a fight with a post box (and lost)._

_He is still Mad Sweeney._

_But sometimes she’ll see him staring at his hands, or off into the distance, and she’ll know there is a difference. Before he had always looked slightly lost, slightly manic, as if the world around him was not lining up the way that it was meant too._

_Now it’s not a lost look in his eyes; it’s something fierce and bright and determined._

_It’s something she feels like she saw shades and shadows of before, maybe only at Coq Noir, but never anything like this, and it leaves her with an odd feeling in her gut._

_It’s something that she thinks others might call belief._

_She has wanted to ask him about that last night at Cairo, about what happened to lead him there, the parts she didn’t see after their fight._

_She hasn’t, too uncomfortable with the vulnerability of asking as if she cares._

_She doesn’t care. She just needed him alive again, and now here he is._

_And if sometimes that bright determination is aimed at her, if she sometimes catches him staring while she grimaces at the return of the flies, the squirm of the maggots…_

_…if sometimes he watches her with something fierce in his eyes that lets her know exactly why she chose to bring him back instead of herself, then so be it._

“How do I look?”

“Cheap.”

She rolls her eyes and pushes past him, knocking him hard enough that he hits the wall with a grunt.

The wind blows at her hat but she can’t feel the temperature at least, and marches her way back to the car. As he climbs into the driver’s side he waits a moment before gesturing pointedly.

“And where to now?”

His tone is mocking but she knows he’ll take her where she wants to go. He’s been oddly willing to tolerate her nonsense today, from the moment she’d kicked him awake in the back seat through to when she’d switched his coffee for her tea when she decided at the last minute that it looked better. He’s stayed quiet, complied with her odd requests, hasn’t mentioned his coin.

He’s been twitchy though, his eyes doing that distant thing more and more often, and his distraction had been half of the reason why she’s wanted to bully him into buying her things.

Laura stares at her reflection in the window, sees the barest hint of her ribcage and split seams, the garish nose a healthier looking colour than her own grey pallor. The fluorescent lighting of the gas station shines against her even more harshly, reflecting in her milky white eyes.

There is no levity here; she is chasing something she cannot capture.

She looks truly ghastly, a dead thing long past its due, something clinging desperately to an earthly shell even as it succumbs to putrefaction. High cheekbones and full lips a cruel reminder of everything gone and better forgotten.

She’s the perfect Halloween ghoul and it’s enough that she can barely move.

"Well? Where does the Wicked Witch want to go?"

She feels a crushing wave of melancholy threaten to rise. She wants to say nowhere, back to the motel, let me throw this shit in the bin and get me out of here. She wants to hide. She’s used to a lack of true feeling these days, unpowered by hormones and stimuli having little effect, but right now she’d give her right arm for numbness (for realsies). 

She feels embarassed and small and furious with herself, with this odd joke she has played on herself, with this fucking attempt to trick herself into believing for a moment that all of this was a choice rather than an increasingly fast decay. She wants to choke on the odd humiliation and weight of it all, wants to pretend she hasn't done this, wants to disappear.

She can see him watching her and wants to tell him to fuck off, stop staring, but before she can say anything he’s turned the car on and is pulling away. She doesn’t ask where he’s going and he doesn’t say anything, but it’s a decision she doesn’t have to make and right now that is exactly what her brain on fire needs.

He drives for a while before pulling into a street. It’s nice, moderately large houses and well-appointed lawns, enough money in the air that people have been able to go all out with decorations. There are no streetlights for some reason but the darkness is punctuated by hundreds and hundreds of jack-o-lanterns, their grotesque grins looking oddly beautiful, their lights a golden-orange glow cutting through the darkness.

He gets out and after a moment so does she. He leans against the hood to light another cigarette without saying a word, and she’s grateful for his silence. There is a lack of pressure to his presence, as if he is in no rush, and they can stay or go, but she’s allowed to be still until she’s ready.

She watches the darkness and lets herself enjoy the sight of all those golden, gruesome grins.

It's not levity, but there is a beauty here, something warm and ghastly, something reassuring in the fact that no one can see her face. 

“Should be turnips.”

His voice is quiet but in the silence of the night it’s like a shout. She doesn’t bother turning around.

“What?”

“Used to use turnips. Changed it to pumpkins over here I think.”

She tries to follow his train of thought.

“Turnips? Gross.”

“Because a pumpkin’s so much fucking better?”

Laura shakes her head, the action making the too big hat slip over her ear.

“Halloween is pumpkins. Also candy.”

“Food.”

“What?”

“Used to be food. Dress up to appease the spirits, go round asking for food, supplies. Just the poor folk.”

She is annoyed now, at his rough voice cutting through the quiet of this golden view. She doesn't keep the snap from her tone, any warmth she has felt towards him for bringing her here evaporating in the wake of this interruption.

“Sorry, since when are leprechauns a ‘Halloween thing’?”

It's dismissive and rude and frankly a little ridiculous to pretend she considers all this otherworldly business to just be a 'thing'. The air quotes might be unnecessary, but she is annoyed, unreasonably so, and perhaps it's partly her own frustration at her earlier vulnerability. 

His laugh is low and dark and sends an unpleasant chill up her spine. It’s not a happy laugh but one that tends to signal his splintered brain has remembered something, taken affront. Like a piece of him that still values himself rises from the depths of his mess.

“Not a leprechaun thing, no. But it wasn’t always this way…Before Mother Church came along and fucking stole it, before the Pope stepped in to take away yet another of the ‘barbaric pagan rituals’” – he should not use air quote either – “it was Samhain.”

She turns around and his eyes are illuminated to the point of looking strangely reflective. When his gaze shifts from the street behind her to her face Laura turns back around, not wanting to be looked at right now.

“….sawn?”

“Please…don’t do that again.”

She doesn’t turn around but knows better than to speak, and when he continues his voice has taken on that distant quality she recognises from his occasional bouts of memory. A story teller tone, a fireside voice, raw and quiet and lyrical.

“Just before winter, they’d want to protect against the cold, the darkness. They’d want their crops and their children to survive. They’d have their feasts and light their bonfires and call out to us, leaving offerings and appeasements. They’d make sure their tables had a place set for their lost ones, knowing the threshold was weak, knowing their day was liminal and pliable. They’d dress and pretend, they’d try to divine what the year ahead held.”

She pulls her sleeve down over her arm where a portion of her wrist bone is disturbingly visible through split skin. Another wave is rising in her throat, difficult to swallow and hard to keep straight.

She forces herself to keep her tone sharp and rude.

“Well…even if it’s different now, it’s still nice having a time where people can dress up and…pretend.”

She keeps staring at the pumpkins and their golden grins, so she doesn’t see him nod as he stares at the back of her lopsided witch’s hat.

“Aye, pretending is important. They’d dress like winter, like sunlight, occasionally like a warrior with his spear or hound.”

His voice grows closer but she refuses to turn around.

“They’d dress up as what they feared, what they wanted to appease.”

Laura blinks back tears reflexively, despite knowing her body won’t produce the moisture. She doesn’t straighten her hat, doesn’t give any indication that his words are like irritatingly accurate darts, hitting closer and closer to the centre.

“Super heroes and scary stories.”

She clenches her fists.

“I arrived, I think. Entered the court. Or someone did…”

The sudden change is a reprieve from her rising sense of panic.

The click of his lighter makes her start at its closeness. She can hear him exhaling a plume of smoke into the cold night air, can see it slipping past her like a shadow.

“And then the Cailleach…the Cailleach would reach bony fingers up into the trees and strip their leaves away…to quicken decay…to guard the doorway.”

Laura turns now as he grows silent, away from the glowing grins and staring up, up, up at him. He’s closer than she realised, staring straight ahead, as if seeing something beyond her, and the motes of candlelight in the lanterns turn his eyes into a moving, shifting thing, oddly reflective.

Her voice is small and quiet in the darkness.

“Doorway?”

He nods, not glancing down at her.

“To the other side. To keep us out, keep us in, keep everything in place.”

She stays very quiet, unwilling to break the spell in his eyes as he continues staring into the jack-o-lantern peppered darkness.

“I stopped feeling it a long time ago, the liminal space, the threshold. But now…”

He looks down at her then and she turns away, turns back to those glowing grins, unwilling to deal with the intensity of his full and disturbingly-sane-for-once focus.

He’s so close behind her now that if she steps back she knows she’ll hit solid flesh, and the temptation is there, truly. The temptation to lean, to sigh into the night and enjoy the sight of those glowing pumpkins, to pretend for a minute that this could be OK.

“Now I’m back and it seems perhaps more of me was brought back than I had before.”

She ignores her own confusion and tries to steady herself, the sight of those glowing lights making her feel disoriented and strange.

“The veil gets thinner and thinner and sometimes I think maybe…” he reaches a hand out and she can see it in her peripheral vision, stretching forward past her.

She feels something strange grazing across the air.

Not the vacuum-like sensation she had felt when they were dragged through the hoard, or the sudden switch from life to death and back to undead life.

No…this feels like someone running their fingers through a thousand threads, lightly caressing the strands, between and through and all around. A whisper across the gossamer, the filaments of existence being stroked and gently shifted.

His fingers extend towards the darkness, towards the light, his palm illuminated by lantern-light, and then his hand slowly begins to close. As it does his grip tightens as though clutching an invisible thread, and he begins to pull.

The sensation shifts from a gentle caress to something forceful, a binding, a winding, a dragging pull as something is brought forward. She cannot move as the feeling builds until she feels a barrier, a divide, a threshold.

His grip tightens and she can feel him press behind her, see the muscles of his arm shift and strain with exertion as he keeps pulling towards his chest. She can’t step back, can’t escape that rising intensity. The sensation builds and suddenly the barrier is just a veil, a diaphanous membrane through which she is pulled, and then…

(For a moment time seems to freeze, as if the universe is deciding whether to allow this turn of events. Perhaps it conducts complex calculations, fine divinations, sophisticated modelling to establish outcome and impact and flow on effect and cost benefit.

Or perhaps it just decides whether this turn of events will amuse it.

Either way, the universe decides to let it pass, so to speak.)

…and then it hits her.

It hits her like a freight train, like a gut punch, like the guilt and relief of being caught cheating.

Her field of vision blurs and shifts until she can only make out darkness and pinpricks of golden light gleaming through, and for a moment she is warm, flushed as if by sunlight pouring into her entire being. She feels herself infused as those threads, that story are brought back through the cobweb fine divide between one world and then next.

“What-“

A thumping sensation in her chest makes her double over, and she turns back to where his eyes hold her, fire bright and calm.

She stumbles forward, collapses against him as her legs give out, her body choking and shuddering against the onslaught.

She tries to speak but finds her throat blocked. With a guttural, gasping growl that she begins to heave and retch into his disturbingly open palms. The coin slips out covered in gore and maggots, the sight causing her stomach to empty again and again until there is nothing left to retch.

He doesn’t seem bothered by the mess, sending his coin away and throwing the rest to the ground, wiping it against his trousers. She makes a mental note to throw those pants away while he’s sleeping and then it hits her.

There, pressed against his chest because she still cannot find the strength to right herself, she hears it.

A low, rushing sound cutting through the night. A thumping sensation in her chest, the burning of muscles long out of genuine use suddenly brought to life.

She pushes away from him and forces burning throat to speak.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“Ah, there she is.”

There she is, gloriously backlit by pumpkin light, her cheap pointed hat askew and her poisonous green eyes flashing with anger and then shock as the chill hits her skin. She stares at her shaking hands, her skin a healthy pallor set aglow by the light, no hint of bone or gore to be found. She pulls the nose from her face, looks for where her cheap hat has fallen, unable to bring herself to pick it up or even move.

She leaves her disguise on the ground.

Laura is hit then by hunger, by thirst, by too much all at once. Her legs start to buckle and he catches her, sits back against the hood of the car so she can lean against him without feeling like she needs to be carried.

She is silent, listens to the sound of her own much needed breathing, lets herself stay leaning against the warmth of him for what seems like hours.

A group of teenagers laugh and cackle as they run past, barely acknowledging the couple looking at the fading Jack-o-Lanterns as the sun begins to rise in the distance. One trips on the end of his mummy costume, dropping a roll of toilet paper before bouncing back up and grinning at the pair. He waves and then shouts over his shoulder as he runs away to catch up with his friends.

“Happy Halloween!”

And so it is.

_Fin_


End file.
